362 Comments

Safety means nothing is safe - terrifying and brilliant. This was the Ruby Ridge and Waco of cute animals. AWFLs are euthanizing our society.

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I think the most disturbing aspects of the Peanut story are: A) some bitch from fucking TX got the wheels going in NY and 2) they found some NYDEC brown shirts to actually do it. Is there anyone with balls any more?

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Only the balls to abuse others. No balls to stand up to insanity. These are the spoiled brats, that the parents never controlled, set lose on society.

To all those pussy parents out there, his blood is on your hands.

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There is a judge in the mix too.

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You nailed it. The peasants and their animals, we are the same to them.

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It is worse than this. We are their charges. They imagine they are improving our lives with their ministrations.

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You might be right about some of them, anyway, but they are still treating us like cattle.

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Nov 3Liked by John Carter

Well when most act like cattle it's not surprising that they treat them as such...

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Oh sure but the most insidious part here is, it doesn't happen overnight. It's step by step, "we have rights, yes we will file a complaint and prove to you etc.," and then suddenly there is this smell of raw meat and a clang and the judas goat is outside.

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Oh yeah they are very good at turning the heat up slowly unless they are being forced into using raw naked power and then that tends to wake some people up especially those on the receiving end of it...I bet you a million dollars that those two could of never imagined that the government would do that to them but for us we know they can and will...

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Nov 4Liked by John Carter

They don't believe that any more than we do. They are drunk on the power to pull the wings off a butterfly.

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… or they are conflating having more power with living in a better society

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So, did Trump say something about, or not?

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Brilliant, Mr. Bezmenov! "This was the Ruby Ridge and Waco of cute animals. AWFLs are euthanizing our society." But I believe the AWFLs (as awful and disgusting as they are) are just aiming the weapon of bureaucracy.... the jack booted governmental thugs who act on complaints are doing the killing. If screeching persons of any age or stage were only screeching and pointing but were ignored they would lose their power. ~ Ginger Breggin

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This battle goes way back to the Aesir and the Vanir...the male Norse gods feeling threatened by the female forces of nature who had dark magic...a "darkness" that threatened the patriarchy with the power to reproduce, and create, a power that the male cannot have without the female. Thus males and bull dog lesbians with a small cognitive penis hate, and feel threatened by, Mother Nature.

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Boy, are YOU reading into all this...

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You do know you can read the actual texts where Vanerna are mentioned?

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Yes - thank you - but in which language? do you have a link?

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Certainly.

This one is to an English version:

https://sites.pitt.edu/~dash/havamal.html

This one collects virtually all the known writings, in several different versions, including some in English:

https://heimskringla.no/wiki/Main_Page

And translation-software is of course an option, even if it will get some older words and spellings wrong.

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Thank you so much. Do you teach/ research this subject?

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You're welcome.

I'm a retired teacher, and I am Swedish so it's part of my heritage, plus personal interest of course. If you go on Archive-dot-org, you should be able to find English translations there too.

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Projecting modern politics about 'Muh patriarchy' onto the early Norse and the development of their Pantheon is beyond stupid. The Vanir were the Gods of the earlier hunter gatherers, the Aesir the Gods of the later Farmers. The two Pantheons were intermingled over time as the two peoples lived together. The same can be observed in the Greek Pantheon, with the comingling of the Dorian and earlier Pelasgic pantheons.

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Freedom first, safety be damned.

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Why does the DEC have a special operation unit? Bunch of dog catchers watched The Wire and got hyped up.

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Seems only yesterday we were regretting how every police dept was getting military equipment and super swatting shit everywhere. Now we have Imperial Dog Catcher Elite Deaths Head units.

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Nov 3Liked by John Carter

Trained by CIA in the School of the Americas. I can MAYBE see SWAT to raid a dogfighting operation but this? Give me a break. This is a bunch of wannabe pseudo-cops wanting to play with their toys and throw their weight around.

England is locked down way tighter than we can imagine but King Charles goes around with his pockets full of squirrels, day in and day out.

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Nov 3Liked by John Carter

I can actually justify their (anticipated) need to use armed force occasionally. Something like a dog-fighting syndicate, or any illegal large-scale breeding operation, out in the rural.

People who are actually cruel to animals are bad news; those who might do it for profit and at scale are likely violent, dangerous psycopaths.

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And that is how the SWAT teams grow. I’m for the market solving things, and forming impromptu task forces out of police forces that are needed for routine policing. Or even the older format of deputizing capable citizens. We have to end our addiction to safety first and big government.

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Pretty much this. They have to semi-regularly go to isolated farms where people are actually abusing or neglecting animals, as well as roam around the woods during hunting season to cite the handful of dumbasses that give responsible hunters a bad name.

As with any of these bureaucracies however, no one actually has the power to make a common-sense judgement call. They’ll just face lawsuits and jail time for failing to enforce regulations written by the Stalinists from NYC who dominate the State Assembly.

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The only bright side is that these people are inept diversity hires, so if the shiz does hit the fan they won't be of much use. Your average 14 year old street gang member could probably clean up an entire squad of them.

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Nov 3Liked by John Carter

Yes, it's an absolute joke to see that woman dressed up in her faux Trooper outfit. Ridiculous.

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The most disturbing aspect is how this was executed. Rather than have an official show up and inform the Longos that they are in isolation of the statute, and that they must either obtain the licenses within X nuber of days or bring the squirrel in, they show up in force with armed men while treating the Longos as dangerous criminals and animals as nuclear bomb components. They can't react to the big problems, but sure can overreact to the small, unimportant ones.

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author

That inability to handle actual problems is probably a significant element motivating the hysterical overreaction to small problems.

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Nov 3Liked by John Carter

I would say it's not inability Brother but a way to create more chaos so the people clamor for more laws and restrictions...

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author

Yes, that's very likely true. The chaos they create creates demand for their services.

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It's the "thus they feel some sense of power" you mention in the post.

That's the propellent for normies turning tools of wrong, when not even evil.

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Nov 3Liked by John Carter

Read Gulag Archipelago and you will understand what is going on and the dystopian future we are headed for...

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Yes. You see this in the UK, Australia and other countries too. Witness the native Britons who were imprisoned for merely talking back to police during the protests over the recent stabbings in the UK. Meanwhile Muslim men were allowed to roam around the streets with weapons.

They only target the relatively powerless and those of certain demographics. They won't go after the violent migrant gangs but they have unlimited resources to chase after hate crimes and regulatory offenses.

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Nov 4Liked by John Carter

Well they've got a big problem now. I'm glad to see people outraged about this. Their @NYSDEC Xitter account had 8,000 angry replies to their pinned post (which had nothing to do with squirrel murder, but was as convenient as anything else to hang all this on) and less than 18 hrs later it's clocked over half a million views and over 10,000 angry comments.

It's a Public Relations nightmare, not just exposing Government bureaucracy over-reach, but well and truly exposing the 'con' in conservation.

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author

Brilliant.

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18 hrs agoLiked by John Carter

A trolling deep fake of the NYSDEC setting up their own SS may be the only apology we get!

https://x.com/Owls_4_America/status/1853182866714161608?t=GIJnys-seqjsjm3t3KD9HQ&s=19

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You are correct. If this is SOP for the DEC, they need to be dismantled. Situations like this is why nullification and a return to local rule need to be a priority. The DEC thugs should have been arrested by the local police until the situation was sorted out.

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Ridiculous, indeed. Worthy of a song by Spike Jones! Me so old.

When der Fuehrer says we ist de master race,

We heil (pffft) heil (pffft) right in der Fuehrer's face,

Not to love der Fuehrer is a great disgrace,

So we heil (pffft) heil (pffft) right in der Fuehrer's face.

When Kapitan Przyklek says we own the world and space (and Squirrels),

We heil (pffft) heil (pffft) right in Kapitan Przyklek's face.

When Kapitan Przyklek says they'll never bomb dis place,

We heil (pffft) heil (pffft) right in Kapitan Przyklek s face.

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She should be denied services everywhere. Right to refuse fascist customers.

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Hmm. Did not our great and long serving People's Representative Maxine the Loquacious point the way?

“Let’s make sure we show up wherever we have to show up,” Waters told a crowd... “If you see anybody from that NYDEC in a restaurant, in a department store, at a gasoline station, you get out and you create a crowd, and you push back on them, and you tell them they’re not welcome anymore, anywhere.”

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It would be useful to have a system (decentralized and hard to shut down) that validates these people as enemies and provides information on them, making it more feasible to deny them services.

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author

Distributed social ostracism. Would be very powerful.

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I have loved that song forever! I think I still have my parents Spike Jones LP around here somewhere. My other favorite one was about windows and doors. I don't remember the name of it.

Thanks for the call back! 🤗

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It was a boudoir glamour shot

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Nov 3Liked by John Carter

I think it was under Obama that all the Federal agencies suddenly started getting military levels of arms, and then it filtered down to the state and local agencies. Local cops riding around in armored personnel carriers, and the IRS getting millions of rounds of ammunition, like they were going to war against Americans - which of course, they are.

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author

Pretty sure it started before this, under Bush, though that was mainly local PDs and Sheriffs getting access to military grade equipment.

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Nov 3Liked by John Carter

Very likely... probably some nice kickback scheme where public dollars were spent on procuring all this hardware for agencies like the DHS and the grift was so good that they expanded the program to the IRS, EPA, etc.

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Edit: It might have been under Bush, early 2000s.

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Fallout of the Iraq war.

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Nov 4Liked by John Carter

Winston Churchill did rightly note that Utopia could only be ushered in by the Gestapo.

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Nov 3Liked by John Carter

Seems like every government agency has its staff of SS/SA jackbooted thugs ready to go kristalnacht on common citizens at the drop of a hat.

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author

I was wondering the same thing.

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Admittedly some wild animals are dangerous.

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And what if we as citizens had a tenth as much gumption as our settler ancestors? You are worshipping the State, Eugene.

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Nov 3Liked by John Carter

One of your best. I will also note that the Department of Environmental Conservation has zero jurisdiction over anything related to immigration. That part of it was just pure harassment. It reminded me of the claim that the ATF went to the Branch Dravidian complex to investigate alleged child abuse. The ATF doesn't do that.

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author

Honestly wouldn't mind if they were harassing obvious illegals. But of course they're going after a woman who's obviously not an illegal.

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Nov 3Liked by John Carter

Beyond the jurisdiction questions, it seems unlikely that wildlife officers would have any training in immigration law.

BTW, I checked to see if squirrels can carry rabies. Yes but it is rare as any animal in a position to transmit the disease would simply kill the squirrel. Per the Canadian government, there is no known case of a squirrel transmitting rabies to a human. So the whole thing looks like an abuse of authority, like SWAT teams shooting dogs.

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Yeah, another commenter noted the staggering implausibility of squirrel rabies, too. There's no way the NYDEC didn't know that. Pure vindictiveness.

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Nov 3Liked by John Carter

I suppose we will find out whether there have been previous conflicts between the owner and the squirrel assassins. As it turns out my dog's vet is having an open house today to meet the new vets so I will see what they say. One thing for sure is that you should never kill a squirrel with 600k Internet followers.

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author

Seriously. I'd be worried it would attract attention from some real … nutjobs.

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Nov 3Liked by John Carter

Just noting that reports are the DEC employee who was bitten was trained on dealing with wild animals. They should know that about squirrels

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Nov 3Liked by John Carter

Needed an excuse to kill it so squeeze it hard enough and it will bite you unlike most people who will just keep taking it...

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Nov 3Liked by John Carter

It could have been scared. Taken away from it's humans, lots of noise and confusion. Stranger handling it roughly. Too bad he wasn't a pit bull, at least some damage would have been done.

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These things indicate one stark observation, the wrong people run everything. It may not be possible to remove them as the wrong people will bolster their position with even more and even wronger people lower down.

I suspect to save our nations we must force alternatives. Withdraw somehow from the machine and create new institutions run by the capable, and explicitly ban political causes; anyone espousing today's trendy cause gets fired.

A certain type now runs Western nations, and they increasingly seem to be true believers, not the detached psychopaths we were promised.

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Power attracts the corrupt, absolute power attracts the absolutely corrupt.

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As hire Bs hire Cs hire Ds. Dumbfucks all the way, up and down.

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As hire As.

Bs hire Cs hire Ds.

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Good points. Maybe it’s unstoppable. This complex hive civ where we are all specialized drones with limited abilities. But I am going to keep searching and resisting.

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It is theirs to lose. What they have built is unsustainable, to coin a phrase. It will collapse in time. Your job is to outlive it.

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Nov 3Liked by John Carter

Keep searching. We need a new way. It will be interesting to see what kind of system develops in a Martian colony. We have to do better.

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Instead of huge institutions, with permanent bureacracies, we can have limited scope contracts to get things done.

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Huge bureaucracy is really a reflection of us. It is the price we pay to not bother. To leave it to others.

Most people I know couldn't be bothered with limited contracts as you suggest. But we can't go on as we are.

One ray of hope is the scale of their inefficiency. They will run out of money.

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They just print money now.

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Agree. They can't run out. They are now running trillion dollar deficits. They just devalue the currency.

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We must separate in whatever way we can from the system and form our own...It's the only way if we are too survive...

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Oh, the detached psychopaths are there. They’re the ones calling the shots. The enforcers are the true believers, really, the useful idiots.

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Great essay! I must have restack quoted half of it. The whole saga of Peanut the Squirrel reads like the script of a Terry Gilliam movie. Like a bunch of extras from the set of Brazil showed up to examine their paperwork. No matter how insane you think clownworld is, they can always show you an even worse level of absurd psychopathy.

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author

It reads like dark satire. Something out of a black comedy.

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Central services

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Nov 3Liked by John Carter

Those anonymous agency thugs have names and addresses.

Solzhenitsen was correct in that the thugs of these evil government organs need to rightly fear that every time they go to do their evil it might be their last. Stupid people might say "well it was only a squirrel" and not comprehend what it represents; that if the bureaucratic state can do that to your pet (with a gang of armed agents, no less) then they can do it to you for any number of bureaucratic or regulatory or police state reasons.

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Nov 3Liked by John Carter

FEMA went to the hurricane ravaged areas of North Carolina and confiscated the aid that outsiders brought in to help the people. In some cases they destroyed the aid packages. They barred volunteers from helping. They blocked runways to prevent planes from landing. The men with guns at home who always say that would never happen here stood by and did nothing. They know that if they lifted a finger in opposition the full force of the law would come down on them. The corrupt system wants people to die.

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You are correct that the men with guns stayed at home and didn't make short work of those government thugs who interfered.

They were still defied in many ways and ignored as much as was possible. And I wouldn't be entirely certain that there wasn't some physical violence administered in some instances, but it's the type of thing that governments don't exactly want to advertise for fear of encouraging more of it.

I was deployed to Iraq long ago, and it was a very violent place. Much of the violence which wasn't directed at the occupying forces was score settling; neighbor against hated neighbor, or Sunni against Shia, which was basically the same thing. This happened because without a strong government under Saddam to keep the lid on, people took advantage of the mostly nonexistent law and order to settle scores. That is what is different here; that and hope. People still think Trump might win and somehow turn this mess around, and no one wants to go to prison while there is still a chance that the bureaucratic state might be rolled back.

I wouldn't rule out the chance that there might be some form of revenge enacted against the figures responsible for the death of the squirrel. Were names and addresses made available I wouldn't sell insurance on their homes or cars. I doubt the cops would investigate too hard in such instances lest they also become targets. The Sam Brown attired Karen isn't the right person, I think. I had made a search of the agency figures yesterday when I heard of this story and a different figure was listed as the interim director, who had given an online interview for some different topic as recently as several days ago. The comments were priceless of course, and his social media accounts are already locked. Undoubtedly, the names and addresses of the goons involved on the raid, the agency leadership, and the agency thug who euthanized the squirrel will surface within the next days and weeks and we'll see who's right about the zeitgeist. Americans are funny in that outrages against a person or people don't inspire much rage, but outrages against an animal or animals (think first John Wick movie, cat-eating Haitians) provokes far more anger. A murdered pet squirrel with half a million social media followers will provoke some kind of response.

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Nobody wants to be the first one to violently resist because it’s a certain death warrant with no guarantee that anyone else will rally to the cause.

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It's only a death warrant if you are caught. People seem to forget that police forces are terrible at figuring out who committed a crime. Without cameras and without some narrative that ties the perpetrator to the victim, they have something like a 5% success rate.

I personally think this is a white person problem. They are pathologically altruistic and entirely dependent on the state to take care of them. Most "minority" groups have absolutely no problem acting as a tribe, clan or extended family unit, dishing out justice directly with no need for state intervention. That's the main reason that the police don't dare confront groups of Muslim men when they are burning cars and libraries in France. They know that the Muslims will not tolerate interference and they have no need for secular law.

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Nov 3Liked by John Carter

I can personally attest to the lack of motivation or police success in solving even simple crimes.

I had a car stolen from my apartment parking lot over a year ago, and the investigating pig didn't make any serious effort to determine who was responsible. There were footprints in the snow of which no casting was made, the vehicle was recovered the following day because someone had reported it blocking an alley. It was never dusted for prints and the thief had left personal belongings in the car which the pigs had no interest in taking as evidence. When I asked why no serious investigation was being done I was told that there was one crime lab for the state and they weren't funded to do an investigation for a stolen vehicle.

It got me thinking that the situation is not likely much better in more populated states, and there's no surge capacity in terms of law enforcement and justice system resources for dealing with a widespread campaign of attacks on their goons and their property. Just like the medical system was unable to handle hordes of plandemic hypochondriacs and resorted to canceling most routine services and procedures, a similar dynamic would likely prevail should Americans in any region lose their fear of the police state and actually start to fight back.

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Fair enough, but come on... you have a disaster area, limited communications, a lot of chaos, etc. It's a fairly easy thing to disappear people if you really want to. Fact is that modern Americans have been neutered. 100 years ago they wouldn't have put up with even a fraction of what they are experiencing nowadays.

The "don't tread on Texas" and "this can't happen in a small town" has proved to be complete nonsense.

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I mean, they took 10+ federal agents with long guns to execute a no-knock, dawn raid on Pennsylvania resident Mark Houck for the offense of praying outside an abortion clinic terrifying his 7 children and wife (even though he offered to surrender to police in the company of his lawyer prior to the raid). Peanuts and Fred were small potatoes. As one of my favorite Irish political commentators frequently says: "the cruelty is the point." (HT: Laura Perrins)

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It is, but on the other hand how many other investigations were stymied for lack of resources while 10+ thugs were milling about outside his house?

Leviathan does not have the resources to deal with serious civil disobedience and campaigns of push back, and depends upon the perception of its strength and limitless resources to intimidate and cowe the populace into compliance. Hence the entirely disproportionate display of power to apprehend a non violent individual for a nonexistent crime.

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Really important article this.

Like those poor dogs that were executed in NSW, at the start of COVID. So that no people would go out into the countryside to claim one as a pet?

Sounds trivial doesn't it?

But it's not. It's unrestrained evil and bile ,with a legalistic mask to cover itself.

Well done, it deserves the attention you give it.

As we once knew?

The devil is in the detail.

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When that particular story first broke, I naively thought it would shake people from their slumber knowing how most react to animal cruelty. I was sadly disappointed.

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When I saw that my first thought was: the unvaccinated are next.

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Nov 3Liked by John Carter

Always HATED the BIC thing with a passion. And to my mind, accidentology is a total pseudo-science: can you really tell how many deaths are avoided statistically by more and stricter speed limits, mandatory belts, smoke detectors, and the rest? Nah. Too many variables. Including the mother of all variables: destiny. It's all so tedious.

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author

The Bic thing is infuriating. Completely pointless. As always, the regulators ignore any inconvenience they cause. So long as they can pat themselves on the back for “doing something”.

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Nov 3Liked by John Carter

There is likely another, more vindictive aspect to the Bic idiocy.

Who uses lighters?

Smokers do.

Smoking was the OG Karen crusade back in the late 80s and 90s, and the harassment of them has never abated. Taxing the shit out of cigarettes to make them too expensive for the working poor, bans everywhere, making smokers stand outside far away from the entrance to buildings, the numerous campaigns to villify them for their disgusting habit, and likely the nonsense with the lighters to inconvenience them further. Of course the reason is hidden behind "safety" but I doubt that was the only or real reason.

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author

On point, and I’ve written about the smoking issue before. The smoking ban handbook was followed to a T during COVID. And just as with COVID, health really has nothing to do with it.

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I once read a marketing survey in the 80s or early 90s that smoking used up an outsized portion of 'disposable' income in relationship to pharmaceuticals....and of course if you can't self medicate with tobacco you may be more inclined to be talked into psychiatric drugs or medicines..... this was before the really big smoking kills campaigns came out. (Iwas a smoker then....I noticed all of that). So "safetly" was the cover reason for vilifying cigarettes, but the real reason was to claim a bigger market share of disposable income for Big Pharma. ~ Ginger Breggin

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author

Interesting wrinkle and wouldn't surprise me. Discourage the use of a drug that makes people a little calmer and clearer of mind - encourage zombie pills in its place.

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Nov 4Liked by John Carter

I don't doubt it.

Aside from smaller portions, not much corn syrup sweetener, and far less processed food, Americans smoked a lot back then. I can't help but think that it is one of several factors that contributed to a much thinner populace. Nicotine is a known appetite suppressor. And probably part of why there's such rabid official opposition to vapes as a less harmful and socially less obnoxious alternative to cigarettes. Especially considering the sick-care industrial complex is behind many of the studies claiming vapes are just as if not more harmful than smoking.

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Nov 4Liked by John Carter

That's why I use a Zippo

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They actively ignore opportunity costs. They go out of their way to *not* see the harms their projects cause. They find a single study about a single variable and use it as justification until the end of time for whatever they want to do. Their selective retardation is cover for their psychopathy.

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It is typically the narcissist that seeks this kind of omnicontrol, whereas the psychopath is usually indifferent. The narc needs to control their world totally. To not do so is to intolerable to them.

So I think we are seeing a narcissistic world unfold, which is worse than anything a psychopath will create.

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author

It's all of those things. Ponerological systems involve the full spectrum of characteropathies.

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They do, and psychopaths are hardly ideal. But I believe much of the drive for the Safety First world you have explored is control freakery emanating from narcissists unable to cope with a world they cannot control. Their response to being challenged is always rage, which we often see.

These are definitely narc responses in my view. And unlike the psychopath, the narcs have a distorted view of the world. Their perception is broken. Hence the clusterfuck of a world we now inhabit.

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20 hrs agoLiked by John Carter

Exactly, and well summed-up.

(Why I can't learn to be so brief I'll never know.)

A person with bonafide psychopathy doesn't care about anyone or anything but herself; it's literally the core issue of the condition, their inability to do so. They do not need approval or adulation or an audience. All they need is their will be done, now, or else. They can't plan, they can't foresee consequences more than immediate ones, and they cannot co-operate in the slightest unless it's under threat of suffering unpleasantness they cannot avoid.

A clinical narcissist craves an audience, actively seeks control of others and thrives on social interactions furthering their sense of grandiosity and being special and unique. And they are able to plot and plan, and to weigh cost/effect of actions (always with an of making others bear their costs whatever they may be) and also always trying to ensure "sainted victim"-status.

A "narc" (good one!) cares about others, but in a bad way. A psycho cares about herself because no other people really exist to their mind.

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I agree. The narcissist must control their world because their enemy is reality. Their persona is fake, an act, and real life always threatens to expose them. Hence the need for control.

It is also why they are perceived as exhausting to deal with. They may hide under the banner of being particular or detail oriented, but it is all about making you do what they want.

In my experience it is incurable. It can only be avoided.

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🙌 I can testify to that!

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Nov 4Liked by John Carter

Sort of like how the EPA totally destroyed gas cans with their stupid nozzle requirements. I only buy old NATO Jerry cans as a result.

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Looked up the data from our Transportation-agency, data going back to 1950.

In 1970 (when seat-belts in the back seat were an option, not mandatory, same with motorcycle-helmets, to name two examples) the death toll was 17/100 000. Highest on record.

That's for 2 400 000 cars, and a population of 8 000 000 (rounded, obviously).

Lowest year on record is 2019 (due to the record not having been updated with 2020-2024 numbers yet, those are still somewhat fluid), with 2.1/100 000 dead, at 5 500 000 cars and a population of 10 300 000.

Between 1970 and 2019, a metric fuck-ton of new rules for traffic safety have been added - the limit for drunk driving f.e. used to be 2/1000 blood alcohol, most can't even walk without help when they're that drunk. Now, it's 0.0%. And on top of that we've added at least a cool million of drivers from the least traffic safety-conscious populations in the world.

On evidence, traffic regulations work.

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I've read the argument that very strict blood alcohol laws only improve safety by taking cars off the road. There is a point of diminishing returns and 0.00 certainly exceeds that. A quick search reveals;

"A study comparing driving performance after 24 hours of wakefulness to performance with a BrAC of 22 μg/100mls of breath (equivalent to 50 mg of alcohol per 100mls of blood) found that sleep deprivation had a greater impact on driving performance than alcohol intoxication."

Some regulations work. Some work by unintended, superfluous means. Some do not work or have severe consequences (baby seat laws that John Carter mentioned).

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Zero-point-zero was made the basic rule for a very good reason: to lessen the odds of "I've only had 1-2-3 pints of strong beer, I'm okay to drive" type of reason.

If stopped and if the test shows positive, you have the right to contest it on the spot, and accompany the officers so that a blood test may be performed. The "public secret" being that the meter has a margin of error of about 0.2 parts per thousand (to you "advantage") built-in.

You literally /must/ drink alcohol to have it show a positive (or use mouthwash containing alcohol just before - if so, the blood test will clear you).

Sleep deprivation making you a worse driver has precisely nothing at all to do with blood alcohol and drunk driving. It is akin to arguing that since phone-surfing while driving distracts more than 2.0ppt blood alcohol, the latter isn't dangerous. Both are bad. Both in combination are worse.

I can't comment on baby seat rules for Canada or the USA since I know less about them than I do of vexilology - but here in Sweden they aren't a problem and have never been. An expensive one might cost about $100, and you can install/remove it yourself in under ten minutes. There are far better examples of "safetyism" gone overboard than such stuff. Here's an example or two:

In the operator's manual for my Husqvarna chainsaw, there's a warning-sign stating:

"Do not stop moving chain with your hand!".

On a beachball I once saw on sale at a local petrol station was a warning label:

"This is not a life-saving device!".

Needless to say, both texts are/were in English.

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I should clarify that. If you are driving home after last call with a single drink in your stomach you are more impaired from the sleep deprivation than the alcohol. The law would reduce accidents, but not because of the alcohol. You should re-read the argument about baby seats. It's not the cost of the first seat, but the third that is most prohibitive. Others have written far more on this if you are interested, but they are clearly not simple straight-forward issues.

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Nov 3Liked by John Carter

I looked up the cost of baby-seats in the USA (by way of the NYT's "best in test" article about it...). How can they be so effing expensive?

You can buy those models here too, and they are pricey, but a fully legal and fully functional one is nowhere near that expensive.

$230 is. . . well, it's bonkers is what it is.

On the other hand, booze and smokes are a heckuvva lot cheaper over there than here, I can tell you. And here, 70% of the price of pack of fags is taxes!

Small wonder we have thriving Black Market for tobacco going, with attendant gang war shootings and bombings.

Wonder if the death toll of the arab/negro gang/clan wars outstrips the one for smoking-related deaths? Somehow, low impulse control drug addicts with access to AK-47s and Red Army surplus hand grenades decades out of due date strikes me as more dangerous than cigarettes.

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I understand what you mean, but sleep deprivation being worse (in your example) does not make having had a drink not bad. Or vice versa.

Baby seats must be extremely expensive in the USA and Canada?

Here, a legal one (and they must be or you can't sell them and your insurance is voided if you use one and have an accident, you might even be criminally liable) cost about the eq. of $80 - $100. Obviously, you can go fancier brand-wise, but you'll gain nothing in safety or ease of use. And those prices are for the ones for kids up to 35 kilos (ca 70 pounds). The rule on kid's seats is based on height - a taller kid who can use the belt without risking to get it across the throat don't need a seat.

It is very very weird for me reading (not just here, I mean in general) about Americans go off on how Europeans (as if we're all one and the same) have no freedom, that everything is regulated, and so on live in a nation where an anonymous call from a different part of the nation can get someone's pet euthanised, after a literal SWAT-team storms the residence.

I don't mean that in derogatory sense, mind, but that it's very weird to experience this glaring conflict between American self-image as the "land of the free" with actual reality.

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Nov 3·edited Nov 3Liked by John Carter

Yes, it's not to say one drink is harmless, especially if compounding exhaustion. At the same time, I don't know, it could well be statistically insignificant in ideal circumstances. Any law should be rigorously examined, especially in the context that safety always has trade offs and statistics often only tell half the story.

As for child seats, there seems to be decreasing additional safety after 2 years and very little to none after 4 years. There are some states that require 12 year olds to use a booster seat based on dubious studies. If you have a large enough car, costs will be marginal to get that third seat. If not (poor people have small cars), the cost of a new car is very prohibitive. A 4th child is definitely out for all but the wealthiest families.

https://thezvi.substack.com/p/on-car-seats-as-contraception

" There are 145,000 births prevented, versus a population of 332 million.

About one American in 1,150 that would have been born since 1980, was never born due to this law. (source for overall births data).

Going forward, given current law, this will likely increase to 1 in ~500.

About one American in 2,500 that would have otherwise been alive today doesn’t exist because of this requirement.

It is not clear these laws do anything to stop fatalities for children over 2.

For every fatality prevented, we prevent at least ~140 births."

I don't have any first hand knowledge of these topics, but that is the summary of the arguments.

One thing I do have first hand experience with is bicycle coaster brakes. The ones you pedal backwards to brake. They are mandatory on kids bikes since at least the 70's. They made sense at one time, but modern brakes are far superior. Any decent manufacturer will also use handlebar mounted caliper or disc brakes, but are still forced to install coaster brakes. They will straight up tell you coasters are inferior and potentially unsafe if trail riding, but that's the law. Many manufacturers will sell you a coaster brake removal kit. We are probably stuck with these laws forever, because safety.

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My favorite, on a package of industrial razor blades:

WARNING: razor blades are sharp!

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C'mon! That has to be with a wink and look, right?

Right?

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No, it is real.

I can actually imagine a version of this that is not absurd and might be useful: "Hi there! Even though each blade has a little cardboard sleeve around it, it's still a RAZOR BLADE. Careful!

Of course this was printed to satisfy some govt. reg., probably by a non-English-speaker. Too bad they can't appreciate the irony that somebody who does not know that "razor blades are sharp", certainly cannot read the warning.

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Too many variables. Too narrow a target. Too slippery a slope.

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Nov 3·edited Nov 3

Do you want a link to the actual data sheet?

I'd appreciate a real rebuttal, rather than a CYA deflection.

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Nov 3Liked by John Carter

You gave general numbers over a huge time span. It's almost impossible to tell how much of the improvement is due to those regulations, much less isolate specific regulations. For that you would need to create a parallel universe as a control for each of them.

Many things could have contributed to the improvement: vastly improved car technology, streamlined and better roads (including improvement in cement technology), better driving training, cultural changes... Even morphic fields leading to better driving, heck lower T levels... We'll never know.

But even if you could prove that this or that measure has led to the reduction of deaths (and I don't doubt that *some* of them did have an effect): how many road deaths are "too many"? If your answer is one, then we are in Covidland, and we might as well ban driving altogether. What freedom-derailing, bureaucracy-imposing, nanny-stating, suffocating measure should be justified to reduce 5, 50, or 500 deaths? And if you make that case, what prevents you from making the case that we need 10 more measures to save ever-smaller numbers of people, cause muh saving lives?

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No, I have specific numbers over a limited and well-defined time-span and area.

Here's a link to the relevant Excel-sheet:

https://www.transportstyrelsen.se/globalassets/global/press/statistik/olycksstatistik/p_nationell_befolkning_bilar_bensin_1950-.xlsx

You're simply wrong on facts, and are trying to cover it with wild flights of fancy and by retreating into the realms of principles.

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The table just shows a more or less linear downward trend over many decades, which does nothing to address the issues I have raised. Which such data can't anyway, except in certain very specific cases where there is an obvious connection between certain drastic measures and a reduction in accidents showing up immediately in the data.

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Nov 3·edited Nov 3Liked by John Carter

Mismanagerial. I like that. They bring pain and suffering as I well know. Years ago, my dad resided in a memory care unit of a local old age home. He kept getting up and falling. That was the main reason we put him in there, to keep him safe from getting up and falling, especially at night.

So, we as a family asked if they could put guardrails on his bed, to at least keep him from getting up at night. No, we were told, that's a restraint and we are not allow to use restraints. So my sister found a mattress that was made so that it was difficult for an elderly person to get out of. Could we use that? NO! It's a restraint! Nothing we proposed to solve the problem of my dad falling was allowed. Somehow they were all restraints. Couldn't do it, you know, for his safety.

So my dad kept falling. He broke many bones, including his hip, pelvis, back, and ribs. All in the name of safety. One time, he fell and was transported to the hospital twice in one day. This caused him much pain and distress, not to mention the distress of his family and the staff of the facility. All in the name of safety.

I hate the mismanagerial class. I hate them with the burning hatred of a 1001 suns.

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author

That’s absolutely horrible. Elder abuse. What happens in “care” homes is criminal.

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New York State killed about 15,000 elderly by putting COVID patients in nursing homes over the objections of the operators. This was after Trump sent a hospital ship and some Christian charity set up a field hospital in Central Park. Both were essentially unused.

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The New York City operation did not want to give Trump or Franklin Graham's Samaritan's Purse charity the pleasure or credit of being able to deliver decent medical care.

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Oh Lizzy, How utterly awful....I am so very sorry you and your Dad and family had to go through that. The brutality is a cold not-caring to the degree that it is dreadfully abusive. ~ Ginger Breggin

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I will add my perspective as someone who works in the medical malpractice world: nursing homes (at least in NYS) really do frequently face a "damned if you do, damned if you don't" scenario. The regulatory agencies don't allow for guard rails, mats on the floor or even bed alarms anymore as they are labeled a "restraint" and violate the resident's rights. I know it sounds insane. Your ire, which is justified, is better leveled at our legislators and regulatory agencies who come up with the rules. Nursing homes are walking the tightrope of compliance and frequently face lawsuits regardless.

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A simple consent form would solve all of that. so I'm not buying the argument.

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When my mother was in a "nursing home" for Alzheimer's, in the mid-2000s, she would have an alarm attached to herself and to the wheelchair, so staff would know if she tried to get up.

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This story is absolutely insane and a clear show of how much power the government has.

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It is not their power that will kill you. It is their amorality and their bureaucratic indifference. Apply either, or both, to medicine and we get something like the promotion of autoeuthenasia as a positive thing. That is happening now and we can expect more of it. And we can expect them to become increasingly detached from reality, in the way people tout abortion as healthcare. Much worse to come I suspect.

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Nov 3Liked by John Carter

on demand abortion being labeled "healthcare" unironically and accepted without thought needs to be a case study in propaganda techniques. Not one in ten would lift an eyebrow at it.

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More than that would defend it as healthcare, including women. And indeed, a masterpiece of modern marketing.

Then again, most dislike thinking.

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Very true

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"This plague of safetyism infects everything."

Yes. But what really blows my mind is the idea of a license for *saving* animals. This is not just safetyism, this is nannyism.

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author

Completely insane, isn't it?

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Batshit crazy, yes.

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Is there a "wrong way" to save an animal that would pose a danger to the community? If it was a bear I could perhaps see the need, but a squirrel?

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What if it is an ILLEGAL squirrel? It doesn’t even have a driving license!

(No, there is no wrong way. I am blazingly angry about this so I can’t do it justice, but there is no wrong way to save any living creature unless you do it by harming another innocent being. That’s how I see it.)

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Nov 3Liked by John Carter

Suddenly we now have "tethered bottle caps" in the UK. The lids to plastic bottles are attached to the bottle by a couple of strips of plastic. It makes them harder to open and close, especially for older people or people with weak wrists, arthritis etc. It makes drinks harder to pour without spilling, and it makes it harder to drink directly from the bottle. It's a small but extremely irritating degradation in design quality. The rationale? To make sure that the lid is recycled with the rest of the bottle and not thrown away. You know, to save the planet. Seriously.

To compound the absurdity, this new stupidity results from an EU directive which does not apply to post-Brexit Britain. But since drinks companies need to manufacture these bottles for the rest of the European market, we get them as well. (Buxton mineral water still comes in old-style bottles and I encourage people to buy Buxton exclusively).

My wife rolls her eyes when I complain about these tethered caps, and I can see that too much Victor Meldrew-esque railing against the modern world can become a little tiresome, and moaning about this stuff does feel very "first world problem". But it's a small thing that is representative of something much bigger. Stuff like this is just one of the hundred things they are doing every day to demoralise us and make our world shitter and stupider.

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author

Those non-detachable caps are incredibly annoying. Up there with cardboard straws and the return of paper bags (or, almost as bad, the terrible canvas bags you have to pay for).

As I said in the piece, no one of these is worth burning everything down over. But in aggregate, it becomes intolerable.

This whole class of interfering people needs to go.

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The canvas bags are bacteria traps unless you wash them after every use which, you guessed it takes energy.

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Nov 4Liked by John Carter

I was feeling just a tiny bit smug about us Britishers not having safety thingies on our lighters. But now you've gone and reminded me of the tethered lids and I'm fucking seething again.

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lol, me too!

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Peanut MUST be avenged!

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A cause we can all get behind. We must build a memorial; perhaps a colossal peanut made from the skulls of Peanut's many enemies?

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With 12 foot bronze statue of Peanut on top. At the base will ba a plaque which reads "How d'ya like themz nutz?".

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Of all the countless outrages we’ve been subjected to in recent years, I think this filled my with more rage and disgust than almost any other.

Cruelty to children and animals is a special kind of evil, and the friendship that an animal offers to us is a sacred gift from nature. There must be no compromise with anyone to impinges upon this. Guess I became an environmentalist!

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author

What’s been really revealing is all of the people on social media - leftists and liberals, predominantly - wondering what the big deal is, it’s just a squirrel.

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Nov 3Liked by John Carter

I can answer that, why they ask what the Big Deal is:

It wasn't their squirrel, or their friend, or a pet-owner of the right identity-characteristics.

(Priority of empathy in the above order.)

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Nov 3Liked by John Carter

It’s almost like the words mean nothing, and never did. That evil is the point rather than the side effect, and the words are just one means to that end.

Are you done yet with materialist explanations for a spiritual problem?

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author

At what point did you get the impression that I insist on materialist explanations?

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Mostly your back and forth with the Kurgan, who sees all of this as emanating from the spiritual. It isn't insistence, I'll grant. But it sure is a marked tendency.

Note the way you framed this incident:

"We live in this kind of society because we have allowed our natural liberties to be nibbled away at, a little bit here and a little bit there, until there is practically nothing left of them"

Sorry, no. We live in this kind of society because far too many of us have no spiritual lodestar at all, and are not good people, and either don't know this or (more frequently) don't care. THAT is what you're encountering in those conversations.

Your explanation is procedural and of forms. What I wrote is spiritual and of essence - and, I submit, is FAR more responsible for our current plight. As the Founders themselves said, it is not possible for a people such as we have become to keep its liberty. The only question is whom and what they will hand their liberties to.

What Peanut reveals is the current answer to that question. But the scope and coordination time-span of obvious evil in our societies raises very obvious questions about its origin and intent.

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It's a family and 600k followers on Instagram. That was the real target.

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You're right: it's the tyranny of the little things, these vampiric government bureaucrats sucking every ounce of joy out of every enjoyable thing to have ever existed, all in a bid to sacrifice ever more to the Godless altar of safetyism. It's fucking exhausting.

There's an irony in it, too, because so often these policies are implemented by lefty-run governments or transnational bodies that purport to care about the little guy while making their lives harder at every turn in a suffocatingly inane way.

Want more examples? Just look at the EU and its holistic environmental policies: tethered caps that help no one and are easily circumvented by ripping them off; return prices on individual cans and bottles at localized repurposing machines, hurting poor Hungarians like me (rich people don't give a shit); carbon taxes on anything and everything, always increasing the never-ending list of regulations, hurdles, and burdens that independent businesses must overcome. The list goes on.

All of it is designed for idiots to feel good about themselves while achieving precisely nothing.

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As a builder/GC, I have seen it grow and metastisize my whole adult life. Ever I hear, "I don't make the rules" about some incomprehensible, unjustifiable rule they are otherwise happy to enforce, raising the cost of every project. The managerial regime will inevitably collapse the economy, and kill people with the same indifference as it did that squirrel.

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author

“I don’t make the rules” is infuriating, an excuse for people to not use their brains … and of course, if you ask them, well who made the rule, then? they would not be able to answer it.

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I’ve gotten several inspectors around here to admit certain building rules are bullshit, but have yet got one of them to bend the rule. I’ve sent emails to the International Building Code people but have never had a response.

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author

Shocking that the building code people wouldn't answer emails. Almost like they don't need to care what people think.

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They don't. They just make more rules to justify their jobs, and then leave it up to individual states to deal with the blowback. A liberal state like Minnesota then adds on more rules, and then blames the IBC.

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